A quarter of a century after her death at the age of just 36, Princess Diana remains a source of fascination to people around the world and her fate still casts a shadow over the British royals.
Diana was killed on Aug. 31, 1997, when the limousine carrying her and her lover Dodi al-Fayed crashed in the Pont de L’Alma tunnel in Paris as it sped away from chasing paparazzi photographers on motorbikes.
Her death plunged the monarchy into crisis, coming after the highly public disintegration of her marriage to heir Prince Charles with its revelations of feuding, adultery, and the misery she had felt in her royal role.
Millions globally mourned the “people’s princess”, as the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair described Diana, who was one the world’s most recognised and photographed woman.
Twenty-five years on, her allure shows little sign of faltering.
There has been “Spencer”, a movie about the tumultuous end of Charles and Diana’s marriage; “The Princess”, a documentary by Oscar-nominated director Ed Perkins; while the hit Netflix drama “The Crown” has focused on Diana in its recent series.
There have been books, countless newspaper articles, numerous TV programmes, recriminations over a controversial 1995 interview she gave to the BBC, and even “Diana, The Musical”, a much panned and shortlived Broadway show.
“Diana still has an impact, there are still documentaries being made about her, stories written about her, people are still intrigued by this woman,” said author Andrew Morton, whose 1992 biography first exposed the deep divisions in her marriage and with whom she secretly cooperated.
“She just had a charisma, she had an appeal which went beyond her royal moniker – it was of an extraordinary human being,” Morton told Reuters.
OMNIPRESENT
For the royals themselves, Diana is still omnipresent, not least for her two sons, Princes William, 40, and
Harry, 37, who have spoken of the trauma her death caused, and how it affected their mental health for years afterwards.
They were just 15 and 12 when they walked slowly behind their mother’s coffin, past a throng of mourners, through the streets of London to her funeral.
“Every day, we wish she were still with us,” William said when the two brothers unveiled a statue in her honour last year at Kensington Palace in central London, her former home.
“I feel her presence in almost everything that I do now,” Prince Harry told a U.S. television interview in April.
Prince Charles has slowly emerged from the shadow cast by his ex-wife’s death, and has now been married for 17 years to Camilla, the woman Diana held responsible for their relationship failing. But, polls show the issue lingers with some.
“I think there’s a generation of people still around who feel that she (Camilla) was to blame for the break-up of the fairytale marriage,” Morton said.
The enduring fascination is also not just with her life, but the manner of her death.
A lengthy inquest concluded in 2008 Diana and al-Fayed were unlawfully killed by the grossly negligent driving of chauffeur Henri Paul and paparazzi photographers pursuing their limousine.
Al-Fayed’s father, Mohamed, had claimed the killing was carried out by British secret service on the orders of Queen Elizabeth’s late husband Prince Philip.
A police investigation which looked at whether she might have been murdered, dismissed a host of conspiracy theories and determined Paul had been drunk and was driving too fast.
But, speculation that she was a victim of an assassination plot still endures, and one of Diana’s former bodyguards made headlines this week by suggesting British security officers might have inadvertently caused the crash.
WHY STILL THE INTEREST?
So why does Diana and her death generate such interest?
“I think the only other moment in my life that I really feel like time just stopped was 9/11,” filmmaker Perkins told Reuters. “Diana’s death really was a moment where the whole world just seemed to be focused on this singular event.”
He was 11 at the time, and remembers the collective outpouring of emotion and the unprecedented scenes of mourning.
“We as humans have been telling ourselves variations of the fairytale myth for thousands and thousands of years. And suddenly this real life fairytale sort of came into being,” he said.
“And this marriage, this fairytale romance, came onto the public stage and gave a lot of people a beacon of hope, something that they really bought into and wanted to work. And I think a lot of people became emotionally invested in wanting that story to work.”
In his 2010 biography, Blair wrote that his famous description of the “people’s princess” now seemed “corny” and “over the top”, but said it was how Diana saw herself and should be remembered.
“Was Diana, the queen of people’s hearts? Just look at the evidence,” Morton said. “The mountains of flowers, the fact that people mourned her loss probably in some ways greater than their own members of their own family.”
Facts about Diana’s life:
- Diana Spencer was born on July 1, 1961, into an aristocratic family, the third of four children of the then Viscount and Viscountess Althorp.
- In 1977 she met Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, at the Althorp stately house.
- On Feb. 1981, her engagement to Charles is announced and on July 29 that year they married in a sumptuous ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, watched around the world. She became the Princess of Wales.
- The couple’s first son William was born on June 21, 1982, and his younger brother Henry – known as Harry – was born on Sept. 15, 1984.
- In 1986, Charles renewed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, a woman he later referred to as “the love of his life”. Diana struggled with eating disorder bulimia as the royal couple continued public duties but led separate private lives.
- In June 1992, “Diana – Her True Story”, by tabloid reporter Andrew Morton, is published with Diana’s secret cooperation. It showed she was trapped in a loveless marriage and had attempted suicide to attract Charles’ attention.
- In August that year, newspapers publish excerpts of a taped telephone conversation between Diana and James Gilby, who called her “Squidgy” and told her repeatedly that he loved her.
- Prime Minister John Major announced the formal separation of the couple in parliament in December.
- Prince Charles gives a TV interview in 1994 in which he confesses to adultery, saying he had remained true to his marriage vows, “until it became irretrievably broken down, (despite) us both having tried”.
- On Nov. 20, 1995, Diana gave a television interview to the BBC’s Martin Bashir in which she admitted adultery with former army officer James Hewitt. She famously stated: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”, a reference to Charles’s relationship with Camilla.
- On Aug. 28, 1996, Charles and Diana divorce, ending their 15-year marriage.
- Diana is killed on Aug. 31, 1997 in a car crash in Paris alongside her lover Dodi al-Fayed. After her funeral, she was buried on an island at Althorp.
- An inquest into her death in 2008 concludes she and al-Fayed were unlawfully killed by the grossly negligent driving of her chauffeur Henri Paul and paparazzi photographers pursuing their limousine.
- A 2021 inquiry concludes that journalist Bashir had lied and shown fake bank statements to persuade Diana’s brother Charles Spencer to introduce his sister to him, and the BBC had covered up his deception. The BBC subsequently makes payments to Diana’s former private secretary and the ex-nanny of Princes William and Harry.
William has said the famous interview should never be aired again and that the deceitful way it was obtained had “substantially influenced” what Diana said.
“The interview was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse and has since hurt countless others,” he said.